Road to El Dorado, The Review

The Road To Eldorado, set in the year 1519, and featuring a pair of Spanish adventurers, voiced by Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh, who are accidentally transported, in one of the ships in Cortez` fleet, to South America, where they are mistaken for Gods by the Indians .. The DreamWorks company has, from the very start, attempted to challenge the stranglehold Walt Disney Productions have in the potentially lucrative area of animation features - lucrative but horrendously expensive to produce, as the people at 20th Century Fox, who just closed down their animation unit, have discovered. Apparently inspired partly by the book and film of Kipling`s The Man Who Who Would Be King (in which a pair of adventurers were also mistaken for gods) and by the old Bing Crosby-Bob Hope `Road To...` movies, The Road To Eldorado is a visually handsome, ocasionally fun film which benefits enormously from the voice skills of Kline and Branagh, who sound as if they`re having fun. Rosie Perez provides a sometimes rather grating voice for the female lead, a cheeky Indian maiden. The film won`t insult the intelligence of adults accompaning the target audience, and there are a few middling Elton John songs in this attractive, fitfully amusing, but generally standard production.